The World Is Burning, and the First Fire Is Hunger

There is a particular kind of silence that settles over a society when injustice becomes routine. It is not the silence of peace but the silence of resignation—the silence that creeps in when people begin to believe that suffering is inevitable and resistance is futile. I have seen that silence in the ruins of Sudan, where families rebuild their lives with nothing but memory. I have seen it in Europe, where refugees wander through train stations carrying the last remnants of their former lives. I have seen it in the Bronx, where hunger hides behind apartment doors and pride keeps people from asking for help. And I have seen it in institutions that claim to serve justice yet hesitate whenever truth threatens their comfort.

I come to this moment not as a scholar or strategist but as a witness. My life has taken me from the red earth of Ghana to the rubble of war zones, from shelters in New York to the quiet corners of sanctuaries where people come not for spectacle but for solace. In every place, I have learned the same lesson: the world does not collapse because of the cruelty of the powerful alone. It also collapses because of the silence of those who know better.

We live in a time when governments speak of “security” while civilians bury their children. When leaders speak of “deterrence” while families search for clean water. When policymakers speak of “necessary force” while hospitals run out of bandages. The language of power has become so sanitized that it no longer resembles the reality it describes. And the people who suffer under that language are expected to endure quietly, as if their grief were an inconvenience.

But grief is not an inconvenience. Grief is evidence. Grief is testimony. Grief is the human cost of political decisions made far from the bodies that absorb their consequences.

I have sat beside mothers in Sudan who braided their daughters’ hair beside mass graves because beauty was the only resistance they could still afford. I have walked through European cities where asylum seekers sleep under bridges while hotels sit half‑empty. I have held the hands of dying men in the Bronx who asked if God remembered them because the world clearly did not. And I have stood in rooms where truth was unwelcome, not because it was wrong but because it was inconvenient.

And now, as bombs fall, as families flee, as children starve, as entire communities are erased from the map, I hear the same question rising again: Where is our humanity? How can we allow children to die in a world of plenty?

It is a question that institutions fear because it exposes the architecture of injustice. It is a question that governments avoid because it reveals the cost of their policies. It is a question that the comfortable dismiss because it threatens the illusion of moral neutrality. But it is a question that refuses to die.

And nowhere is that question more urgent than in the realm of food—the most basic covenant of life.

Food as Weapon: The Global Injustice of Hunger

Food is the first covenant of life. To eat is to live; to share is to belong. Yet empire has turned this covenant into a curse. Grain is hoarded, seeds patented, and hunger engineered. The injustice rooted in food is not scarcity—it is deliberate policy, a siege against humankind.

Historical Grounding

Colonialism uprooted subsistence farming and replaced it with monocultures for export: cotton in India, sugar in the Caribbean, cocoa in West Africa. Famines were not natural disasters—they were manufactured by empire’s demand for profit.

The Bengal famine of 1943 killed millions while rice was exported to feed colonial armies. Ireland’s Great Hunger was worsened by grain shipments leaving for England. These were not accidents of weather—they were crimes of policy.

Contemporary Fire

Today, food injustice continues under new disguises:

Seed patents criminalize ancestral practices of saving seed, forcing farmers into dependency.
Commodity speculation turns wheat and rice into gambling chips for hedge funds while families starve.
Grain blockades in Ukraine ripple across Africa and the Middle East, leaving millions hungry.
Food aid arrives with strings attached, undermining local agriculture and sovereignty.

The injustice is systemic: those least responsible for global crises suffer the most.

The Human Face

A child in Yemen wastes away while ships of grain sit offshore. A farmer in India takes his life under the weight of seed debt. Families in Haiti eat mud cakes to quiet their hunger. Mothers in Sudan cradle infants while silos overflow elsewhere.

This is not scarcity—it is injustice. Hunger is empire’s quietest weapon.

Prophetic Polemic

Empire’s arsenal is vast:

Trade embargoes choke nations into submission.
Climate colonialism intensifies droughts and floods while polluters remain untouched.
Corporate monopolies control seeds, fertilizers, and markets.
Debt and austerity force nations to cut food subsidies, leaving the poor exposed.

The cycle is relentless: extraction → dependency → hunger → obedience. Food is weaponized, and humanity itself is held hostage.

The Summons

The world is burning, and yet we are still asking permission to speak. We are still waiting for the “right moment,” the “right language,” the “right platform,” the “right tone.” Meanwhile, the people who suffer do not have the luxury of waiting. Their lives unfold in real time, without footnotes, without diplomatic phrasing, without the protection of distance.

Human rights are not abstractions. They are the minimum standard of dignity owed to every person simply because they exist. When governments violate that standard, when institutions excuse it, when the public grows numb to it, we are witnessing not just political failure but moral collapse.

And so I write this not as condemnation but as invitation—an invitation to remember that silence is not neutrality, that suffering is not inevitable, that justice is not a theory but a practice, that conscience is not a burden but a responsibility.

Closing Benediction

May food be freed from empire’s grip. May seeds return to the hands of farmers, and grain to the mouths of the hungry. May hunger be named not as destiny but as injustice. And may the whole world eat—in dignity, in freedom, in peace.

The post The World Is Burning, and the First Fire Is Hunger appeared first on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Sammy Attoh.

Print Share Comment Cite Upload Translate Updates